Anyone wanna debate Global Warming?

Just fucking great. Deserts and drought in Africa. Ice Age in Europe and North America. I think I will buy a house in Sydney.

I wouldn't worry about it. Thermohaline shutdown in the next 100 years due to global warming is a very low probability event. Even though it is possible it is a worst case scenario.
 
I wouldn't worry about it. Thermohaline shutdown in the next 100 years due to global warming is a very low probability event. Even though it is possible it is a worst case scenario.

Deserts and drought also "in the next 100 years due to global warming is a very low probability event. Even though it is possible it is a worst case scenario."

The point being, nobody knows for sure what is going to happen since we know so little....even Nobel Prize winner "Global Gore" himself.
 
As an exercise I took this months issue of Journal of Climate:

I took all the authors that had published papers in that issue, and then attempted to track down their beliefs on AGW. Often this was found on personal websites, or in two cases interviews.

I categorize the authors into 3 groups:
ACCEPT - when I find clear evidence that they accept AGW
REJECT - when I find clear evidence that they reject AGW
UNKNOWN - when I could not find evidence either way

Remarkably I did not find one REJECT, but I did find seven clear ACCEPTs.

Here are the ACCEPTs with the reason:

The rest are marked UNKNOWNS. This is because no clear stance could be found about their views online at all. This is not unusual, in fact many of the ACCEPTs above would have been marked UNKNOWN if it wasn't for a single piece of information found.

With some of the multiple authored papers there are one or more post-grad students, and typically they have no personal website or any interviews to their name. I don't expect information will be found to classify these people.

In several cases below, information online strongly suggests they do ACCEPT (eg they work with GCMs for example), but it's not clear cut so they are left as UNKNOWN. In contrast I found no information on any of the people below suggesting that they REJECT.

The unknown list:

Sang-ki Lee
David B. Enfield
Joanna M. Futyan
Anders E. Carlson
Peter U. Clark
Grant M. Raisbeck
Bernadette M. Sloyan
E. M. Fischer
S. I. Seneviratne
D. Lüthi
C. Schär
Lucie A. Vincent
William A. van Wijngaarden
Ron Hopkinson
Lazaros Oreopoulos
Steven Platnick
Anders E. Carlson
Peter U. Clark
Grant M. Raisbeck
Bradfield Lyon
Simon J. Mason
Scott J. Eichelberger
Ying Li
Riyu Lu
Buwen Dong
Robert Lund
Xiaolan L. Wang
QiQi Lu
Jaxk Reeves
Colin Gallagher
Yang Feng


In conclusion this supports a consensus of scientists publishing climatology papers accept AGW. Well that's to be expected really, the university courses teach it, virtually all climate related scientific organizations officially accept it, so of course you'd expect that he majority of experts in the field accept it too.

Hey congratulations. You may have found a bonafide pro-AGW climatologist in P L Vidale who's credentials seem to qualify--I haven't looked at them really closely. It is interesting though that his U of CO advisor was Roger Pielke who is not a climatologist but he is well credentialed in environmental science. He does not discount anthropogenic influences on the climate out of hand, but he has been a strong critic of conclusions of the IPCC et al re AGW and has denounced what he describes as their irresponsible alarmist tactics.

At any rate, any scientist working for the AMS will be expected to toe the line on being pro-AGW as that is the AMS stated position--stated in some lengthy detail even. That is not to suggest that Vidale's opinions are automatically suspect--he may hold strong convictions--but just that he works for a pretty tunnel-visioned outfit on this particular issue. That of course would hold true of the rest of those on your list.

Nevertheless I appreciate having the name. I missed it during occasonal forays through the AMS site. And such names are hard to come by.
 
Hey congratulations. You may have found a bonafide pro-AGW climatologist in P L Vidale who's credentials seem to qualify--I haven't looked at them really closely. It is interesting though that his U of CO advisor was Roger Pielke who is not a climatologist but he is well credentialed in environmental science. He does not discount anthropogenic influences on the climate out of hand, but he has been a strong critic of conclusions of the IPCC et al re AGW and has denounced what he describes as their irresponsible alarmist tactics.

The IPCC working groups are full of scientists who are "well credentialed in environmental science." If this is a sufficient qualification, then there are many well-qualified scientists (by your standard) who are pro-AGW.
 
The IPCC working groups are full of scientists who are "well credentialed in environmental science." If this is a sufficient qualification, then there are many well-qualified scientists (by your standard) who are pro-AGW.

The IPCC working groups are full of scientists who are "well credentialed in environmental science." If this is a sufficient qualification, then there are many well-qualified scientists (by your standard) who are pro-AGW.

There are many qualified scientists of various disciplines who have contributed much to the debate. No doubt there are some on that IPCC list. My contention is, however, that there are so few PhD climatologists, especially paleoclimatologists--people with the degrees and a lifetime of studying the broad spectrum of climate chage--who are pro-AGW advocates, I think reasonable people should give that some serious thought. It certainly should be part of the debate.

I'm not vouching for the accuracy of this YouTube tape, but it also should give us at least something to think about:

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXxKOkzciG4[/ame]
 
At any rate, any scientist working for the AMS will be expected to toe the line on being pro-AGW as that is the AMS stated position--stated in some lengthy detail even. That is not to suggest that Vidale's opinions are automatically suspect--he may hold strong convictions--but just that he works for a pretty tunnel-visioned outfit on this particular issue. That of course would hold true of the rest of those on your list.

I think these individuals are typical of working climate scientists. Virtually all scientific organisations related to climate (AGU, AMS, NOAA, NASA) have official positions pro-AGW. And virtually all climate scientists are associated with one or more of these organisations. I do not understand the claim of tunnel-vision.
 
I think these individuals are typical of working climate scientists. Virtually all scientific organisations related to climate (AGU, AMS, NOAA, NASA) have official positions pro-AGW. And virtually all climate scientists are associated with one or more of these organisations. I do not understand the claim of tunnel-vision.

My definition of "tunnel vision" is the phenomenon of stated positions based on opinons of scientists who agree on a particular point of view and do not include opposing opinions so that the researcher can compare. The IPCC, NAS, and AMS, among others, seem to be guilty of this at least to some degree. If we accept the content of the YouTube clip I posted, the IPCC is even more than tunnel visioned but is also dishonest in some of the names it cites as scientists consenting to the IPCC position.
 
There are many qualified scientists of various disciplines who have contributed much to the debate. No doubt there are some on that IPCC list. My contention is, however, that there are so few PhD climatologists, especially paleoclimatologists--people with the degrees and a lifetime of studying the broad spectrum of climate chage--who are pro-AGW advocates, I think reasonable people should give that some serious thought. It certainly should be part of the debate.

From what I have seen most climatologists and paleoclimatologists are pro-AGW.
 
From what I have seen most climatologists and paleoclimatologists are pro-AGW.

I sure haven't been able to find more than two or three credentialed climatologists and/or paleoclimatologist who are pro-AGW. Perhaps you could provide a list of names? I have asked a number of pro-AGW proponents to do this on several different forums, and so far nobody has had any better luck than I have had. Maybe you will be the exception.

(For purposes of clarification here, I do not consider astrophysicists, geologists, meterologists, biologists, plumbers or accountants to be credentialed climatologists with the expertise that only a person educated, credentialed, and life work devoted to climatology will possess. Some degrees in environmental sciences do focus on pure climatology, but most do not. All claiming the title do not have the credentials to back that up. Other scientists including earth scientists, mathematicians, statisticians, economists, etc. have significantly contributed various kinds of useful expertise to the debate. Some are pro-AGW advocates; some are not. I am looking for the ultimate experts, however, the climatologists, who can convince me that AGW is happening and/or global climate control is anything humans can do anything about. I think if we cannot find true experts who believe in AGW, we should think about that really hard before we start making expensive and possibly counterproductive policy that will affect millions and billions of people.)
 
I listed a few on the last page, including Ed Brook, who is listed as specializing in paleoclimology
http://www.geo.oregonstate.edu/people/faculty/brooke.htm

Dennis L. Hartmann,
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~dennis/AABiography_2007.htm
Hartmann's research interests include dynamics of the atmosphere, atmosphere-ocean interaction, and climate change. Current research includes the study of climate feedback processes involving clouds and water vapor, which is approached using remote sensing data, in situ data and models, and attempts to take into account radiative, dynamical and cloud-physical processes. Another focus of his research is observational and modeling studies of the intraseasonal and interannual variability of the coupled ocean-atmosphere system, especially the role of eddy-zonal flow feedbacks and annular modes of variability. Another current interest is the stratosphere and its role in climate.

Hartmann has published more than a hundred articles in refereed scientific journals and published a textbook on Global Physical Climatology in 1994. His primary areas of expertise are atmospheric dynamics, radiation and remote sensing, and mathematical and statistical techniques for data analysis. He is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was awarded the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal in 2005. He has served on numerous advisory, editorial and review boards for the NRC, NSF, NASA and NOAA. He currently serves on the Board of Reviewing Editors for the magazine Science, the NRC Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, and is co-editor of the International Geophysics Series of Academic Press.

If climatologists exist then these people are examples.
 
Please post recent reports. The atmospheric and surface compositions are so much different between the two that it would be almost ignorant to compare the two.

Interesting how you chose to ignore the scienctific comentary in the rest of the post.

With regard to the thread question. I doubt many will argue the earth is warming. The question is why? And is it a bad thing?

Like it or not the issue has become far more political in nature than scientific. Does it not strike you as a bit odd that the lead proponent of AGW is not only not a scientist, but is a politician? That should send alarm bells off for just about anyone to start questioning whether their is another agenda here. Many cite the IPCC report as proof of AGW. It is has it's flaws that can be found with just a little digging. The group was commissioned by a group of politicians. That being the case can you imagine the political and social ramifications if the IPCC came back and said man is not the main cause of global warming?

I believe perspective has a lot to do with the way we react to things. As a country we are losing perspective of the past as turn to becomeing (and really already are) an instant gratification society. If we had any perspective at all perhaps we would first ask if this has ever happened before. We know the earth has been warmer than this and we know it has been colder than this. And has fluctuated since the beginning of time (before man was even an issue). Why climate has fluctuated, we aren't entirely sure but we are understanding more (see the post about sun cycles). Could that be what's happening now? Of course it could. Could we be causing the bulk of the current warming? Possibly. But more and more evidence suggests otherwise, as does a little common sense.
 
I appreciate the fact that Al Gore brings concern for the environment to public awareness. It may encourage people to not pollute. Don’t throw garbage on the curb. Don’t throw trash in the lakes and oceans. Put litter in its place. Recycle paper, aluminum and glass. Conserve electricity within reason – doing so saves money on your electric bill and it saves electricity.

On the other hand, when he starts to lecture us on “man-made global warming” and we are turning the earth into a greenhouse, I practically close my ears. Humans may have contributed to global warming like a rock influences the flow of a river or like a brick influences the size and shape of a mansion (hardly at all). There have been ice ages and warming spells millions of years before man industrialized the planet.

I think that volcanoes and earthquakes do more to mess up the atmosphere and environment in 1 day than man could negligently do in 1 year.
 
The IPCC working groups are full of scientists who are "well credentialed in environmental science." If this is a sufficient qualification, then there are many well-qualified scientists (by your standard) who are pro-AGW.

You may not be aware that the IPCC doesn't do research. The IPCC is essentially a data collection group and that is what they did with regard to global warming. They did no research of their own. What they did was collect information and publish essentially a sumarry of what they found.

Or so they say. With a little work you can find some of the inconsistanices in how they arrived at their support for AGW. The now proven to be flawed hockeystick graph being the prime example.
 
Bobn writes
If climatologists exist then these people are examples.

No, while I do not dispute that scientists educated inother disciplines can know a great deal and contribute significantly to the debate, I want credentials - at least a masters, preferably a PhD specifically in climatology or in atmospheric sciences with focus on climatology i.e. a dissertation completed addressing climatology and/or paleoclimatology. I want the guys who are identified as climatologists as opposed to meteorologists or other disciplines. A title doesn’t quite get it because some will be identified in the media as ‘climatologists’ when in fact they are not.

Hartman for instance holds degrees in Mechanical Engineering and
Geophysical Fluid Dynamics. An interest in, research in, and even competence in climatology no doubt gives him a huge leg up on most. But it does not suggest the level of expertise that somebody who has studied and devoted his/her education and life to climatology. (One also wonders why he is editing environmental science magazines and writing environmental publications rather than working in his own discipline?)

Oregon State doesn’t show what Ed Brook’s bachelors and masters degrees at Duke and U of Montana were which pretty much suggests they weren’t related all that much to his PhD which is shown Ph.D. MIT/Woods Hole Joint Program in Chemical Oceanography, 1993, which is impressive and certainly qualifies him as a voice in the debate, but does not indicate specific expertise in climatology or paleoclimatology.

There are many manyaccomplished, qualified, competent scientists who have offered pros and cons on both sides of the debate and I do not consider them unworthy participants in any way. Many bring necessary expertise that a climatologist might not have.

But I am looking however for the positions of the ultimate experts - the bonafide climatologists/paleoclimatologists who have devoted their education and life's work to that specific subject. And I would be more reassured that AGW exists and/or is a problem if more of them agreed with that.
 
Some interesting observations and questions on the subject. No doubt to be immeditately discredited by any number of methods not including refuting the actual evidence.

Global Warming

by Tom McClintock

Speech: At the Western Conservative Political Action Conference, October 12, 2007



You have extended to me a very dangerous invitation tonight - to speak to a gathering of political conservatives on the day that Al Gore has received the Nobel Peace Prize for discovering that the earth's climate is changing.

I've heard that he's going to contribute half of his prize money to environmental causes and use the other half to pay his electricity bill. And anything left over will come in handy to help pay for the fleet of private jets that allow him to travel around the world to tell us that you and I need to ride our bikes to work. You have to admit, there is a certain Helmslyesque quality to it all - "We don't conserve - only the little people conserve."

Of course, for those in the liberal elite who jet to environmental conferences in Gulfstream Fives and drive around in Hummers singing the praises of hybrids and bicycles, the Left now sells indulgences - you can actually calculate your sins on-line and they'll gladly tell you how much money to send them (all major credit cards accepted) to assuage your conscience.

These indulgences will be used for such activities as planting more trees to absorb carbon dioxide. After all, young trees absorb an enormous amount of this "greenhouse gas" - far more than old trees. But isn't replacing old-growth timber with young-growth timber what lumber companies used to do until the radical environmentalists shut them down?

They've also forbidden the clearance of flammable brush from around your home in areas like Lake Tahoe - that's an affront to Mother Nature. You're supposed to either let it burn - and your home along with it - or just let it sit and rot because those are the two best ways for Nature to release lots of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Apparently natural carbon dioxide is a good thing and man-made carbon dioxide is a bad thing.

That's also why we're supposed to do away with chemical fertilizer and replace it with natural compost, because replacing man-made greenhouse gases with natural greenhouse gases is the wave of the future.

So are electric cars and trains. But this also gets a little complicated, because there are only two ways of generating vast amounts of clean electricity: hydroelectricity and nuclear power. But there's no faster way to send one of these Luddites into hysterics than to mention that inconvenient truth.

The politically correct replacement is solar energy - roughly 17 times more expensive than either nuclear power or hydroelectricity - meaning, of course around 17 times LESS electricity to run electric cars and trains. Energy conservation, then, is the answer, which is why we're being told only to use energy efficient fluorescent lights rather than the warm and fuzzy incandescent bulbs. But wait - didn't we just ban the disposal of fluorescent lights with your trash because of the extreme environmental hazard they pose in our landfills?

So I approach the subject tonight with an admitted level of confusion as to what these people are thinking.

And I also approach it with a certain degree of trepidation. After all, at Al Gore's rally to save the planet in New York in July, no less an authority than Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that those of us who still have some questions over their theories of man-made global warming are "liars," "crooks," "corporate toadies," "flat-earthers" and then he made this remarkable statement: "This is treason and we need to start treating them now as traitors." Ah, the dispassionate language of science and reason.

In a speech in New York several months ago, our own governor called those who question the religion of global warming "fanatics" and vowed our political extinction. I certainly don't want to die a traitor's death or be run out of town on a rail. So I want the record to be very clear: I believe that the earth's climate IS changing and that our planet IS warming.

I actually figured that out in grade school in the 1960's when our third grade class took a field trip to the Museum of Natural History and saw the panorama of dinosaurs tromping around the steamy swamps that are now part of Wyoming . They were right next to the exhibit of the Wooly Mammoths foraging on the glaciers that were also once the same part of Wyoming . And I never got a Nobel Prize for that discovery. In fact, I later found out that my third grade teacher never even nominated me!

Then I got to high school in the 1970's and learned from the Al Gores of the time that we foolish mortals were plunging ourselves into another ice age. All the scientists agreed.

By the way, you may have seen the Washington Times story a few weeks ago about the researcher who recently stumbled upon a lurid story in the Washington Post dated July 9, 1971. It included the scary headline: " U.S. Scientist Sees New Ice Age Coming."

The scientist based this on a scientific climate model developed by a young research associate named James Hansen. They warned that continued carbon emissions over the next ten years could trigger an unstoppable ice age.

This is the same James Hansen who is one of the gurus of the current global warming movement. And it is the same James Hansen who, just three months ago, published a paper claiming that continued carbon emissions over the next ten years could trigger a run-away greenhouse effect.

Let me begin by asking three inconvenient questions:

First, if global warming is caused by your SUV, why is it that we're seeing global warming on every other body in the solar system? For the last six years, the Martian south polar ice cap has conspicuously receded. Pluto is warming - about two degrees Celsius over the past 14 years. Jupiter is showing dramatic climate change by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit. Even Neptune 's moon, Triton, has warmed five percent on the absolute temperature scale - the equivalent of a 22 degrees Fahrenheit increase on Earth - from 1989 to 1998.

If you have any doubt, just Google "Pluto Warming" or "Mars Warming" or whatever your favorite planet might be.

Meanwhile, solar radiation has increased a measurable .05 percent since the 1970's. Is it possible that as the sun gets slightly warmer, the planets do too? This would be a little scary in its own right, except for the second inconvenient question:

If global warming is being caused by your SUV, why is it that we have ample historical records of periods in our recent history when the planet's temperature was warmer than it is today?

During the Medieval Warm Period, from about 900 to 1300 AD, we know that wine grapes were thriving in northern Britain and Newfoundland and that the temperature in Greenland was hot enough to support a prosperous agricultural economy for nearly 500 years.

That period was brought to an end by the Little Ice Age that lasted from 1300 until 1850. We know that during colonial times, Boston and New York Harbors routinely froze over in winter and during Elizabethan times, an annual Winter Festival was held ON TOP OF the Thames River , which froze solid every year.

And finally the third inconvenient question: If global warming is caused by YOUR SUV, why is it that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide always follow increases in global temperatures by several hundred years, indicating that CO2 is a byproduct of increasing temperatures - not a cause.

Is it possible that this is the reason Al Gore won't debate the subject? You've seen the "Inconvenient Truth." In it, he portrays himself as an indefatigable, lonely sentinel (who should have been President of course) wandering the planet trying desperately to awaken the world to the danger it faces. "I've given this speech a thousand times," he says about a thousand times.

But according to the Chicago Sun Times this pious paragon of truth - who assures us he's willing to go anywhere and talk to anybody to save us from our mortal folly - is strangely UNwilling to take up the Heartland Institute's publicized offer to organize an international debate on the subject. The Institute has challenged our new Nobel Peace Prize laureate of the left to debate any one of three internationally recognized authorities who dispute his claims, and it's willing to front all costs - at Oxford University , no less, and in a format of Gore's own choosing.

After all, Gore's new book extols the importance of science and reason in the public policy debate, so what better way to deliver the coup de grace to the "skeptics" than to expose their fallacies in front of an international audience?

And yet, Al Gore, who has given his speech "a thousand times," won't give it just once more in a forum where it might be questioned by a knowledgeable authority.

We're told that the debate is over and that all scientists agree. Call this the Emperor's New Clothes argument. But it's simply not the case.

The ISI Web of Science is one of the most comprehensive collections of peer-reviewed scientific papers in the world. A recent survey of all papers on the subject of climate change that were published between 2004 and February of 2007 found that only SEVEN percent explicitly endorsed the position that man-made carbon dioxide is causing catastrophic global warming. SIX PERCENT explicitly rejected it and a majority of the remaining papers were neutral.

In fact, another directory of peer-reviewed scientific papers explicitly refuting the theory of human-induced catastrophic global warming lists over 500 leading climate scientists. The survey itself was conducted by a team that included Fred Singer, author of "Unstoppable Global Warming - EVERY 1,500 YEARS", whose qualifications include being the founding director of the National Weather Satellite Service.

I believe it was Ogden Nash who wrote:

"The ass was born in March. The rains came in November?

"Such a flood as this, he said, I scarcely can remember."

But now I would like to address myself to a grim subject: the actual threat that global warming poses to our planet - and most specifically to California . And that threat is very real and it is devastating.

I speak specifically of the radical policies that the global warm-mongers are now enacting.? Last year, in the name of saving the planet from global warming, California adopted the most radically restrictive legislation anywhere in the nation, including AB 32, which requires a 25 percent reduction in man-made carbon dioxide emissions within 13 years. To put this in perspective, we could junk every car in the state of California RIGHT NOW - and not meet this mandate.

Californians just approved $40 billion of bonds that California 's political leaders promised would be used for highways, dams, aqueducts and other capital improvements. They are desperately needed.

But at the same time, those same political leaders have imposed a 25 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.

Now here's the problem: Building highways, dams and aqueducts requires tremendous amounts of concrete, the principle ingredient of which is CEMENT.

How is cement produced? It is produced by taking limestone and super-heating it into a molten state - it comes out the other side as a compound called clinker. Clinker is about 2/3 the weight of the original limestone. The missing 1/3 of that weight is carbon dioxide. And when you include the emissions required to superheat the limestone, it turns out that for every ton of cement, a TON of carbon dioxide is released. It's the third biggest source of carbon dioxide in all human enterprise.

But now we have a law that specifically forbids us from doing so. That was the essence of the Jerry Brown lawsuits against new highway projects that were part of the summer budget impasse.

Citing AB 32, Brown argued that unless the counties could show how they would build highways without using earthmoving equipment or concrete - and that once built, that people would not drive automobiles on them - the only legal use of the funds would be to promote mass transit, transit villages - and I'm not making this up - pedestrian trails and bicycle paths. So much for construction.

Agriculture is in big trouble, too. You can start with nitrogen fertilizer, which is a critical component of all agricultural activity. Unfortunately, it produces large amounts of nitrous oxide, another so-called greenhouse gas that must be radically curtailed in California .

The wine industry is also in for a shock. Fermentation of wine occurs when a molecule of glucose in the grapes is converted into EQUAL PARTS of alcohol and Carbon Dioxide.

But the biggest agricultural impact is the administration's mandate for heavily subsidized use of ethanol fuel. Ethanol is produced in exactly the same way as the alcohol in wine: the glucose in corn is converted into equal parts of ethyl alcohol and CARBON DIXOIDE.

Following AB 32, the governor's appointees on the California Air Resources Board imposed a requirement that ALL gasoline sold in California within THREE YEARS, must be comprised of at least TEN PERCENT ethanol, doubling the current mandate.

Now think about this: an acre of corn produces about 350 gallons of ethanol. There are 15 billion gallons of gasoline used in California each year. In order to meet the ten percent requirement in three years, it means converting 4.3 million acres of farmland to ethanol production. Now that's a lot of farmland, considering that we have a total of 11 million acres producing any kind of crops.

Current ethanol mandates are already producing serious shortages in other parts of the world, as farmland that had been producing food shifts to ethanol to chase hundreds of millions of dollars of government subsidies coming out of your pocket. There were riots in Mexico earlier this year in response to spiraling tortilla prices.

And we're seeing this across the board - including commodities like milk and beef that are responding to increased prices for corn feed. And as you see your grocery prices rise as a result of this policy, just be glad you're not in the Third World . Food is a relatively small portion of the family incomes in affluent nations, but they consume more than half of family earnings in third world countries.

So when the global warming alarmists predict worldwide starvation, they're right. THEY'RE CREATING IT!

While we're on the general subject, you may have noted that Interstate Bakeries announced last month that they are completely withdrawing from the Southern California market - they are shutting down four bakeries, 17 distribution centers and 19 outlet stores - and throwing 1,300 employees out of work. They're the makers of Wonder Bread, Roman Meal Bread, Home Pride and Baker's Inn . If you're a fan of those breads, you'd better stock up now - they'll be gone by the end of October.

They cited the high cost of doing business in California , but I believe had they stayed they would have faced an even thornier problem: bread is only bread because of the carbon dioxide produced by yeast. It's the same chemical process we've been talking about, although in this case, the central ingredient IS the carbon dioxide. That pleasant smell of baking bread is the ethyl alcohol oxidizing as those gases are vented during baking.

Electricity prices are also taking a heavy hit. California already suffers the highest electricity prices in the continental United States , but that situation is about to worsen.

A companion measure to AB 32 was SB 1368 that prohibits the importation of electricity produced by coal - even state-of-the-art plants thousands of miles from California that meet all EPA requirements.

Truckee became the first victim of this law. Truckee was about to sign a 50-year contract for electricity produced by a new coal fired plant in Utah . They were forced to back off because of AB 1368. They just announced the new contracts to replace that lost power. Instead of paying $35 per megawatt hour, Truckee electricity consumers will now be paying $65 per megawatt hour.

It gets worse. Last month, the chairwoman of the Air Resources Board - which was given virtually unlimited power by AB 32 - announced that they will TRIPLE the number of AB 32 regulations this year.

The radical laws now in place in California are having a dramatic impact on energy production, agriculture, manufacturing, wine-making and construction, just to name a few sectors of our economy.

We are already seeing the economic impact in California .

Nationally, the unemployment rate is stable at 4.6 percent. Until last year, Californian's unemployment rate tracked with the national figures, but since January - while the national rate has remained stable at about 4.6 percent, California 's unemployment rate has skyrocketed from 4.8 percent to 5.5 percent.

I was struck by the Governor's speech to the United Nations last week. He said:

"Last year in California , we enacted groundbreaking greenhouse gas emission standards. We enacted the world's first low carbon fuel standard.

"Do I believe California 's standards will solve global warming? No.

"What we're doing is changing the dynamic, preparing the way and encouraging the future..."

So even the individual most responsible for this economically catastrophic public policy ADMITS that it's not going to solve global warming. He just wants to set an example. I believe he is going to set an example, all right.

Responding to the enormous new burdens imposed on our economy, our state's revenues have taken a dramatic turn for the worse. On June 30th, we closed the books on the biggest deficit in California 's history - more than $6 ½ billion.

We just got the first quarter revenue numbers for this new fiscal year. State revenues needed to grow TWICE as fast this year as they did last year to avert an even bigger deficit.

In the first quarter, though, our revenues are actually shrinking. Last year at this time, we had $1½ billion in the bank - we now have a bank overdraft of $7 ½ billion that's being covered entirely by internal borrowing.

That's a NINE BILLION DOLLAR DIFFERENCE. And that's the measure of our actual year-over-year deficit spending.

Combined with the growing budget deficit projection for next year, we could be facing a two-year gap of $20 billion by May - and we don't have the money to cover it.

There is one other thing that strikes me on this issue, and that is how puny is the amount of carbon dioxide produced by human enterprise, compared to simple, natural processes.

The AB 32 mandate is to reduce man-made carbon dioxide emissions by 170 million metric tons per year. That's what all this tremendous economic dislocation is about.

Now let me mention one other man-made source of carbon dioxide that they don't count.

Every one of us in this room will produce about 2.2 pounds of carbon dioxide today - by breathing. That's over 800 pounds of carbon dioxide per year. If anyone brought a pocket calculator, pull it out and stay with me here.

There are 6.6 billion of us on this planet. That comes to 5.3 trillion pounds or 2.4 BILLION metric tons of carbon dioxide - simply through the process of human respiration. And that's before you count up all the cats and rats and elephants.

So all of this economic dislocation is over a tiny fraction of natural carbon dioxide emissions.

The only good news I can offer is that perhaps we're all wrong. Perhaps the unprecedented burden now imposed upon our commerce will produce a wave of new investment and innovation and environmental purity as the Governor has so loudly promised. Perhaps the unprecedented levels of deficit spending will send our economy into paroxysms of prosperity. Perhaps.

But there's another possibility. There's a possibility that we're right, and that the inevitable economic realities of these outrageous regulations are already beginning to destroy California 's once-vibrant economy in a dark and miserable example of human folly.

And we must be prepared for that possibility. In normal times, citizens don't pay a lot of attention to public policy, and that's why democracies occasionally drift off course. But when a crisis approaches, that's when you see democracy engage. One by one, citizens sense the approach of a common danger and they rise to the occasion. They focus - they look beyond the symbols and rhetoric - and they begin to make very good decisions. Political majorities can shift very quickly in such times. Polls can reverse themselves almost overnight in such times. And I believe that day is now rapidly approaching.

People ask me all the time: "What can I do?" And the only answer I can offer is the answer the great abolition leader Frederick Douglass offered to a young protégé. He said, "Agitate. Agitate. Agitate."

We have greater tools with which to communicate with our fellow citizens than ever before. The Internet and talk radio have given us powerful new ways to organize and reach people. And we have something else that's even more important: truth and common sense.

We have based our entire form of government on the assumption that when democracies engage, they make very good decisions. The radical policies now imposed on California are already beginning to impact the economy, and will have an increasingly negative effect as they proliferate in coming days. As the impact of these policies is felt, people will begin paying close attention to policy making and the policy makers responsible, and then they'll begin exercising something that the majority of California 's public officials have so completely lacked: simple common sense.

And at that moment, we will see a new political awakening and a new political realignment in California , and before you know it, we'll be living once again in Reagan Country.
 
Bobn writes
Hartman for instance holds degrees in Mechanical Engineering and
Geophysical Fluid Dynamics. An interest in, research in, and even competence in climatology no doubt gives him a huge leg up on most.

Not all climatologists have degrees titled climatology, and not all paleoclimatologists have degrees titled paleoclimatology. In many cases they have degrees in related fields. The expertize of a researcher and their field of work is more determined by the research they publish than the name of the degree they took. For example William Ruddiman is a well known paleoclimatologist, but his Ph.D. was in Marine Geology.

Both Hartman and Brooks are climatologists, with Brooks also being a paleoclimatologist by the nature of his published research in ice cores and distant climate changes. Hartman teaches Climatology, has written a textbook on climatology and has also published many on it.

But it does not suggest the level of expertise that somebody who has studied and devoted his/her education and life to climatology.

That is what Hartman has done.
Some titles of published research:
The General Circulation of the Atmosphere and its Variability
Radiative and Convective Driving of Tropical High Clouds
Influence of doubled CO2 on ozone via changes in the Brewer-Dobson Circulation
Changes in the strength of the Brewer-Dobson Circulation in a simple AGCM
The life cycle of the Northern Hemisphere sudden stratospheric warmings
Cloud-radiative forcing and climate: Insights from the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment

But I am looking however for the positions of the ultimate experts - the bonafide climatologists/paleoclimatologists who have devoted their education and life's work to that specific subject.

Can you give five examples of such people? I don't honestly know what kind of people you are thinking of.
 
Some interesting observations and questions on the subject. No doubt to be immeditately discredited by any number of methods not including refuting the actual evidence.

Don't worry I will explain why a lot of the science talked about is wrong.

Then I got to high school in the 1970's and learned from the Al Gores of the time that we foolish mortals were plunging ourselves into another ice age. All the scientists agreed.

This is false. All the scientists didn't agree, in fact very few were putting that hypothesis forward.

By the way, you may have seen the Washington Times story a few weeks ago about the researcher who recently stumbled upon a lurid story in the Washington Post dated July 9, 1971. It included the scary headline: " U.S. Scientist Sees New Ice Age Coming."

The scientist based this on a scientific climate model developed by a young research associate named James Hansen. They warned that continued carbon emissions over the next ten years could trigger an unstoppable ice age.

Except James Hansen hadn't even started writing climate models in the Early 70s, so that's a false claim right away.

Let me begin by asking three inconvenient questions:

First, if global warming is caused by your SUV, why is it that we're seeing global warming on every other body in the solar system? For the last six years, the Martian south polar ice cap has conspicuously receded.

These aren't inconvenient questions, but the answers may be inconvenient:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17952631/
It should also be noted that Martian south polar ice cap receeding does not show "global warming" on Mars as claimed.

Pluto is warming - about two degrees Celsius over the past 14 years. Jupiter is showing dramatic climate change by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit. Even Neptune 's moon, Triton, has warmed five percent on the absolute temperature scale - the equivalent of a 22 degrees Fahrenheit increase on Earth - from 1989 to 1998.

A few of these are again regional climate changes, however the large variance between them makes it quite clear this isn't being caused by a single source (ie the sun). Pluto not only lies far out from the sun, but it's orbit is currently taking it further from the sun anyway.

Meanwhile, solar radiation has increased a measurable .05 percent since the 1970's. Is it possible that as the sun gets slightly warmer, the planets do too?

Sure, but even a 0.05% increase (another record shows no increase) is not enough to explain the warming observed on Earth in the past 3 decades.

If global warming is being caused by your SUV, why is it that we have ample historical records of periods in our recent history when the planet's temperature was warmer than it is today?

So increasing greenhouse gases cannot cause temperature rise because something else can cause temperature rise? How does that logic work? The same thing about the medieval warm period and little ice age. How does natural varaition in the past (which is a given) prove that greenhouse gases have no effect on temperature?

And finally the third inconvenient question: If global warming is caused by YOUR SUV, why is it that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide always follow increases in global temperatures by several hundred years, indicating that CO2 is a byproduct of increasing temperatures - not a cause.

The inconvenient answer is that co2 is a cause of warming and warming is a cause of co2 rise, both are true. The recent co2 rise has been virtually all human caused, so we only see one half of that equation in recent decades.

The ISI Web of Science is one of the most comprehensive collections of peer-reviewed scientific papers in the world. A recent survey of all papers on the subject of climate change that were published between 2004 and February of 2007 found that only SEVEN percent explicitly endorsed the position that man-made carbon dioxide is causing catastrophic global warming. SIX PERCENT explicitly rejected it and a majority of the remaining papers were neutral.

It found 45% either explicitly or implicity endorsed the position and only 6% rejected. The "neutral" papers are simply papers in which the subject was not brought up. Another way of looking at it is the numbers clearly support a consensus of support for manmade global warming.

In fact, another directory of peer-reviewed scientific papers explicitly refuting the theory of human-induced catastrophic global warming lists over 500 leading climate scientists. The survey itself was conducted by a team that included Fred Singer, author of "Unstoppable Global Warming - EVERY 1,500 YEARS", whose qualifications include being the founding director of the National Weather Satellite Service.

The survey of 500 scientists contains scientists who clearly support anthropogenic global warming and so they have just been mislabelled as being skeptical of it. These surveys are notoriously bad for incorrectly interpreting papers as not agreeing with manmade global warming.

There is one other thing that strikes me on this issue, and that is how puny is the amount of carbon dioxide produced by human enterprise, compared to simple, natural processes.

Natural processes absorb more co2 than they emit. Human activity does not.

Now let me mention one other man-made source of carbon dioxide that they don't count.

Every one of us in this room will produce about 2.2 pounds of carbon dioxide today - by breathing. That's over 800 pounds of carbon dioxide per year. If anyone brought a pocket calculator, pull it out and stay with me here.

There are 6.6 billion of us on this planet. That comes to 5.3 trillion pounds or 2.4 BILLION metric tons of carbon dioxide - simply through the process of human respiration. And that's before you count up all the cats and rats and elephants.

The carbon in breath comes from the food we eat. The food we eat gets that carbon from the atmosphere. We are just putting back what we took out perhaps as short as a year back. The cycle there is so short that overall breathing is carbon neutral, in the same way as biodiesel is (same principle).
 
Some interesting observations and questions on the subject. No doubt to be immeditately discredited by any number of methods not including refuting the actual evidence.

:clap2: great speech!

To partially summarize:

California's radical legislation last year demands a 25% reduction in carbon dioxide within 13 years.
These are some things that produce carbon dioxide:

Cement for new bridges and construction (can we say Minneapolis on steroids?)
Fertilizer for agriculture (less food, higher food prices)
Wine fermentation (oh no! less wine?...anyone for grape jelly?)
Making ethanol from corn (what a radical dilemma!)
Baking bread (Wonder Bread left the state!... Oh no!...no bread for that jelly!)
Making electricity using coal (higher prices plus here come the brownouts!)
People breathing (better hold your breath you Callyfornians!)

"The radical laws now in place in California are having a dramatic impact on energy production, agriculture, manufacturing, wine-making and construction, just to name a few sectors of our economy."
Already some Economic impact:

Higher unemployment (from 4.8 to 5.5%)
Sinking revenues (billions!)
Climbing deficits (biggest in CA history!)

Wow! Way to go you Californian global-warming "progressives"!
:eusa_clap:
 
Don't worry I will explain why a lot of the science talked about is wrong.

Just out of curiosity, what is is your scientific background? In other words with what credibility do you dispute the evidence provided in that speech?

I saw no links, basically just your word.
 
Just out of curiosity, what is is your scientific background? In other words with what credibility do you dispute the evidence provided in that speech?

I saw no links, basically just your word.

Just going with the style of the speech. Here are some links documenting the errors.

no ice age theory in the 70s: http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/

Hansen hadn't started writing climate models in the Early 70s:
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/distro_Grandfather_70924.pdf

In 1976, with four colleagues, I wrote my first paper on climate (Science, 194, 685-690, 1976). Based on the suggestion of Yuk Yung, one of the co-authors, we examined, for the first time, whether several human-made trace gases might have an important greenhouse effect (until then, only carbon dioxide and chlorofluorocarbons had been considered). We found that methane and nitrous oxide were likely to be important, though measurements of how these gases might be changing were not yet available. Starting then I became interested, very interested, in the Earth’s climate; indeed, two years later I resigned as Principal Investigator of an experiment on its way to Venus so that I could devote full time to studies of the Earth’s climate.
So it was a bit of a surprise when I began to be inundated a few days ago with reports that I had issued proclamations five years earlier, in 1971, that the Earth was headed into an ice age.

0.05% increase in TSI is not enough to explain the warming observed on Earth in the past 3 decades:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/VariableSun/variable4.html

Co2 is a cause of warming and warming is a cause of co2 rise, both are true:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=13

The survey of 500 scientists contains scientists who clearly support anthropogenic global warming and so they have just been mislabelled as being skeptical of it. The list of 500 scientists is here (http://downloads.heartland.org/21977.pdf), it's a list of papers that the skeptics have interpreted as explicitly refuting the theory. It includes:

Nicolas Caillon et al., “Timing of Atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic Temperature
Changes Across Termination III,” Science 299 (2003): 1728-31.

Nicolas Caillon, Scripps Institutionion of Oceanography
Jeffrey P. Severinghaus, Scripps
Jean Jouzel, French Atomic Energy Commission
Jean-Marc Barnola, Laboratory of Glaciology and Geophysics Environment, France
Jiancheng Kang, Polar Research Institute of China
Volodya Lipenkov, Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, St. Petersburg, Russia

One of the authors, Severinghaus (author too of the realclimate article above) has said the following about this ice core co2/temperature lag being misused by skeptics:

Severinghaus told Crikey that he doesn't make a habit of Googling his own research, but Bolt appeared on his radar when a librarian in Brisbane wrote to him asking if "I'd really meant what Bolt said I meant".

He didn't. "Many, many other studies have found that carbon dioxide causes the earth to warm. This is not controversial, and to continue to deny it is akin to denying that cigarette smoking causes cancer," Severinghaus told Crikey. "The evidence for a human-caused warming of the globe is overwhelming. The scientific debate is over, and what we are seeing now is an attempt to mislead the public."

Severinghaus explained how Bolt had been slippery with the facts, "...Bolt omitted the key piece of information that the warmings took 5,000 years, thus misleading the reader into thinking that carbon dioxide was not warming at the same time as temperature and thus cannot have caused the warming..."

Severinghaus wrote a letter to the editor of the Sunday Mail, but it was never published. He posted a comment on Bolt's blog but told Crikey "...effectively I have not been able to make much if any response".

"At the very least I would like it to go on record that Bolt's abuse of my science is not done with my approval," says Severinghaus.

So is the professor sick of having his research misrepresented in the press? "My research actually mostly isn't misrepresented," he told Crikey. "But it is sometimes misrepresented on climate-denialist websites. I suspect, though do not know, that Bolt got the info from a climate-denialists website."

Natural processes absorb more co2 than they emit. Human activity does not:
http://www.uwsp.edu/geo/faculty/ritter/geog101/textbook/earth_system/carbon_cycle_NASA.jpg
 

New Topics

Forum List

Back
Top